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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Security and usability
From:       Gav Wood <gav () indigoarchive ! net>
Date:       2003-08-18 13:30:13
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> > They don't know *who* you are, but maybe in two years
> > they get access to data that let's them assign your real name to your
> > cookie. And then suddenly you are not anonymous anymore, even the things
> > you did two years ago can be connected to your name. Is that "harm"? Yes,
> > I think so.

me too.

> The same could be said about IP-numbers so we all had to start using
> anonymizing proxies for everything.

ip numbers are different in concept to cookies for several fundamental 
reasons.

a nat, proxy or anonymising firewall will all provide an unreliable "tag" of a 
user. cookies provide a far more reliable tag of a user (technically cookies 
tag a browser installation on a specific hard disk, which is far more closely 
liked to the user than the ip address of the machine that initiated the http 
session).

essentially, if ip address were a lot better than cookies for keeping track of 
the user, cookies would be obseleted. but they're not, which is why cookies 
have their niche and ip address are not considered reliable enough for user 
tagging.

> So I'm really very sorry when I don't see how annoying user's with
> cookie-warnings is increasing privacy.

in essence you are right in that ip address could be used to tag some users 
better than cookies (namely those with static ips who connect directly to the 
website). however in the general case cookies perform the job better. what's 
more, it's far easier and costs much less (in features, time, money) to 
simply discard a cookie than to completely anonymise your http session. 

so if all cookies that are not neccessary to the functioning of a website were 
discarded, then it *would* surely lead to increased privacy.

now, let's relate this to usability:

i would imagine most users (generally) do not want to be bombarded with cookie 
acceptance questions each time they go to a random website. i personally 
don't mind "sifting through the rubbish" and only letting legitimate cookies 
through, but everytime a friend uses my machine they get annoyed with the 
incessent dialogs.

so the software should become more clever and automatically accept cookies 
that are definately good (session cookies?), reject cookies that are bad 
(cookies from another server) and do something useful like tentatively accept 
cookies of unknown karma with an ignorable but informative passive popup.

gav
-- 
Gav Wood <gav@indigoarchive.net>

codito ergo non satis bibivi
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